Giveaway at ISTE 2013 will be followed by discount offer during the back-to-school season

After giving them away to TechED attendees for just $99 a pop, Microsoft is now getting ready to sell the Surface RT to K12 and higher education institutions at a slightly higher, yet pretty “aggressive”, price of $199. Given all the reports of a large unsold inventory and recent murmurs about a Qualcomm-powered version, it seems as if Microsoft is trying to get rid of all those unsold Surface RT tablets in a jiffy.

Will this make you consider a Windows RT tablet?

There's no need to wear a helmet when you walk down the Windows RT tablet aisle at your local Best Buy or Microsoft retail location, it's not as though the ARM-based devices are jumping off of store shelves. Might that change sometime in the future? Adding to the value proposition of owning a Windows RT slate and in an effort to boost demand, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2013 RT will be available on such devices as part of the free Windows 8.1 update that's coming later this year.

Project canceled due to fear of failure

HTC planned to enter the thinly populated world of Windows RT tablets with a 12-inch tablet, a new report claims, but eventually decided against it as fear of failure set in. It might still have enough confidence in Microsoft’s ARM-friendly OS to try its hands at a more conventional form factor, though.

Windows 8 users may not have to wait until “Blue” for much-needed improvements to core apps

Tami Reller, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of Windows at Microsoft, last month admitted in an interview with ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley that first-party Windows 8 apps are far from perfect in their current state. Now the veteran scribe is reporting that updates to first-party apps bundled with Windows 8 might be available much earlier than previously believed.

After delaying the launch of a Windows RT tablet, Acer is now ready to make the jump.

Acer has been outspokenly critical of Microsoft's decision to launch its own brand Windows 8/RT hardware, but that isn't the only reason the OEM has yet to release a Windows RT tablet of its own. The Taiwanese computer maker decided it was best to take a wait-and-see approach, allowing Microsoft to be the guinea pig. Apparently satisfied with what it saw, Acer says it plans to release a Windows RT tablet of its own sometime later this year.

Microsoft Surface RT sales “significantly lower” than shipments

Microsoft has been mum on Surface RT sales ever since the Windows RT device first hit the market on October 26, 2012, even maintaining its deathly silence on the subject during its recent fiscal second quarter earnings call. There can be only one explanation for this: Surface RT sales have been low. So low, in fact, that the company is embarrassed even to talk about it.

The Surface RT firmware update Microsoft made available last week as part of this year's first Patch Tuesday brought with it a number of improvements, including improved audio playback in Connected Standby and “additional capabilities for handling firmware updates during low battery situations.” But as with most firmware updates, there are always issues, known and unknown, that remain unresolved until a future update — or, as in this case, a simple registry hack — gets rid of them.

After studying the market, Samsung decided now is not the time to launch a Windows RT tablet.

We don't know what the future holds for Windows RT tablets, but if we had to guess, well, it's probably not good. Overpriced and hamstrung by an operating system that can't run legacy applications, Windows RT tablets are of limited appeal, and at least one major vendor wants no part of it. For now, anyway, Samsung won't be launching a Windows RT tablet in the U.S. market.